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.NET Micro Framework includes reach graphics capabilities with WPF-like libraries, and quite a few high end development boards (Tahoe II, ChipworkX, or FEZ Cobra to name a few) include fancy graphic TFT screens, often with touch input thrown in as well. But this comes at a significantly higher costs, and requires a speedy CPU. Thus it might seem that if you are using a much cheaper board such as Netduino or one of FEZ family, you are doomed to rely on blinking LEDs only. Not quite so. In most scenarios ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, SilverLaw, Nigel Sampson(-2-), Mohamed Mosallem, Vikram Pendse, Ward Bell, Gill Cleeren, Jag Reehal, and Enrico Gebauer. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso announces a Texas-sized event: Sharing in the Light – I dive into Silverlight Development with Blend – Two day event in Dallas Sept. 25 & 26 From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Silverlight Configurator/Pivot (View Model/MVVM) Michael Washington has a cool app up using ViewModel/MVVM that allows users to query a collection ...

There have been several questions on StackOverflow about how to determine if a type is defined in the .NET Framework or is a third-party or custom type. Based on the answers provided to these questions, this can be accomplished using some reflection to retrieve the public key token of the assembly in which the type is defined and compare it to a public key token known to be used by Microsoft to sign the .NET Framework assemblies. Update: Based on some additional research and a Twitter conversation ...

With Pete's guidance, it will feel like you have that super-smart coworker in your cubicle at all times. A new Silverlight 4 book is coming out on September 7th and I had a chance to review it before it hits shelves. After reading the book and some chapters multiple times, I can tell you that this is the best book for a developer wanting to learn Silverlight 4. If you are wondering if you should buy the book or not then let me answer that right now. YES. I would definitely recommend this book to ...

In this Issue: Peter Bromberg, Derik Whittaker(-2-), Paul Patterson, Michael Crump(-2-), Gill Cleeren and Kevin Dockx, Gergely Orosz, Dimitris - Ilias Gkanatsios, Jaime Rodriguez, and Georgi Atanasov. Shoutouts: My friend Koen Zwikstra poses the question How can we improve Silverlight Spy?... log into the forum and give him ideas. SilverlightShow announced Free SilverlightShow Webinar: Sketchflow in Real Scenarios Senthil Kumar announced Microsoft Patterns & Practices – Windows Phone 7 Developer ...

Spent some time getting my butt kicked by SQLServer2008 R2. I had SQLServer2005 on there and never did really care for the install I had going on that, and I have to believe that’s what part of my problem was because I could not connect to anything useful with the new install. After a failed attempt at a repair, I finally said screwitall and unistalled both, and reinstalled SQLServer2008 R2. Then I could connect in the manner I thought I should So I got the AdventureWare database installed and the ...

In this Issue: Sergey Barskiy, Tim Heuer, Shawn Wildermuth, Patrick Cauldwell, David Anson, Michael Sync, Jeremy Likness, Victor Gaudioso, René Schulte, John Papa, and Todd Knudsen. Shoutouts: Telerik's Premium Collection for .NET wins Jolt Product Excellence Awards: App Libraries and Frameworks SilverlightShow announced a Free SilverlightShow Webinar: Running Silverlight Outside the Browser and with Elevated Trust... see you there... I'll be the one in shorts with no shoes :) John Papa has a two-part ...

So last week I began my series with a post (here) on those little wonders in .NET/C# -- those small tips and tricks that make code either more concise, maintainable, or performant. This is the second of my three-part series, though there are so many things that make .NET (and in particular C#) a great development platform that I'm sure I could carry this blog on ad infinitum. Once again, many of these are ones you may already know, but hopefully some of you will find something new or be reminded ...

This is just going to be a quick post on some techniques for getting your XAP size down when creating games for WP7. It is by no means exhaustive. First, XAP files are basically zip files with specific requirements re: mandatory content and directory layout. So any solutions that would involve zip-style compression will almost certainly result in a larger XAP sizes due to added code. So those type of solutions are off-the-table. But if you can shrink your source input in ways that zip compression ...

I had to run an errand the morning of Day 1 and returned to find the FedEx paperwork from Minerva. My benefits ended August 31. I don’t believe I’ve ever worked anywhere that benefits ended the day of… but it also included the COBRA papers and that’s gonna run roughly $850/month starting *now* … a big bite into the reserves to try to extend the money. Conversation with the HR lady was strained… she was really glad to get off the phone, guess maybe they *do* read my blog – I hope so! Got an unexpected ...

In this Issue: Anton Polimenov, Paul Patterson, Beth Massi(-2-), Derik Whittaker, Dinesh Sodani, jbaird, priozersk, Kyle McClellan(-2-), Dimitris - Ilias Gkanatsios, and Matthias Shapiro. Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra amazingly enough has the latest Silverlight already in Silverlight Spy 3.0.0.13 ... get the download SilverLaw has a cool Silverlight game up: SilvAir Strike - A Silverlight 4 Game The Silverlight Team Blog posted this article: The Future of Silverlight Peter Torr posted his Sample code ...

In this Issue: Benjamin Gavin, Haruhiro Isowa, Scott Fletcher, Georgi Atanasov, Timmy Kokke, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Anoop Madhusudanan, Mike James, Beat Kiener, Rudi Grobler, Lightswitch Tutorial, Jeff Brand, Manfred Pohler, Indrajit, Levente Mihály, and Erik Klimczak. Shoutouts: Jesse Liberty has posted The Great Silverlight Competency Test [2] Michael S. Scherotter posted BALL Watch Silverlight Contest Winners Announced ... and wow... do those look great!! ... congratulations everyone! Max Paulousky ...

PivotViewer series Building your first PivotViewer application Runtime PivotViewer collection creation PivotViewer - Working with Facets Handling PivotViewer events PivotViewer - Custom actions PivotViewer and MVVM Intro In this tutorial about the Silverlight PivotViewer control I would like to explain how to make use of Custom Actions. Small labels are placed on top of items in the viewer and clicking them will trigger an event. --> The only downside of these actions is that they aren’t fully implemented. ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Erik Klimczak(-2-), Kevin Marshall, Mike Ormond, Chris Anderson, Derik Whittaker, Michael Crump, Peter Torr(-2-), Ryan Alford, Amyo Kabir, and Kunal Chowdhury. Shoutout: Emiel Jongerius announced he has Update postings on Datagrid for a couple of his recent posts. From SilverlightCream.com: A DotNetNuke Silverlight Expense Report Module Michael Washington is back on ViewModel code, and also DNN with this end-to-end expense report module sporting Silverlight inside ...

In this Issue: Benjamin Gavin, Richard Waddell, Kunal Chowdhury, Chris Koenig, Timmy Kokke, cherylws, David Anson, Jeremy Likness, David Kelley, Andy Beaulieu, and Walt Ritscher. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight TreeView Case Study - FAQ Maintenance - Part 1 Benjamin Gavin is pulling together the posts he's recently done and producing an updatable FAQ file app -- something I find useful -- and this is part 1 ... good stuff! Extending Central Silverlight Business Rules to Client and Server Side ...

PivotViewer series Building your first PivotViewer application Runtime PivotViewer collection creation PivotViewer - Working with Facets Handling PivotViewer events PivotViewer - Custom actions PivotViewer and MVVM Intro Today I would like to go into a little detail about the events used in the PivotViewer control for Silverlight. If you haven’t worked with the PivotViewer yet you might want to read the getting started tutorial I wrote earlier first. CollectionLoadingCompleted The CollectionLoadingCompleted ...

In this Issue: John Papa, Beth Massi, Simon Jackson, Rob Miles, Pete Brown(-2-), Senthil Kumar, Don Burnett(-2-), and Brian Noyes. From SilverlightCream.com: Apply and Customize the New Silverlight Themes Tsitsi Gora joins John Papa on the latest Silverlight TV to discuss the new Silverlight themes -- did you know about them? -- how about tips on customizing them from one of the devs?? cool stuff. Visual Studio LightSwitch How Do I Videos 5 Lightswitch training videos from Beth Massi ... and more ...

Dru and I were recently featured on Herding Code Podcast. In the podcast we talk about everything from package management in general to Nubular (Nu) to other package management systems (OpenWrap, Bricks, and Horn, although horn was/is slightly different) to the possibility of Microsoft releasing a package management system. It was a good time and I enjoyed doing the podcast, but the herding code guys start recording at an insane 10:30 PM! I have no idea how I made it through the whole thing and was ...

We all have those little wonders in our .NET code, those small tips and tricks that make code just that much more concise, maintainable, or performant. Many of you probably already know of some of these, but many folks either overlook them or just don't know about them, so this article is a refresher. I'm planning on making this a three-part series encompassing 15 little wonders that I had thought of, though I'm very curious to hear the little wonders you can think of as well. Update: Part 2 is now ...

In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss Justin Angel, Kunal Chowdhury, Emiel Jongerius, Microsoft, Channel 9, András Velvárt, Timmy Kokke, Microsoft Expression Blog, Jesse Liberty, and Jeremy Likness. Shoutouts: Jeff Weber announced Farseer Physics Engine 3.0 RELEASED, has a link to it and information about it. Jesse Liberty has posted The Great Silverlight Competency Test – Part 1 Chris Koenig announced Sharing the Light – Silverlight Development with Expression Blend... DFW Silverlight training with Victor ...

One of the biggest features that I always heard about with the iPhone is it has an App for everything. Must suck to be an iPhone developer right about now with everything having been created already. Sure looks like it’s a great time to get in on building Apps for Windows Mobile or more specific the Windows Phone 7 device even. In fact you only have to visit the Mobile App Match site to learn what people want and what some of the Devs are creating even. I think this site can be a great source of ...

I've been taking quite a prolonged break from blogging, partly because my attention has been elsewhere. Writing several chapters for BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed (due to be published towards the end of the year) has taken up a lot of time. I'm also involved in helping or organise Rules Fest 2010. And then there is the day job,...and four kids,...and two cats,...and management of a local youth club,...and organising my wife's 50th, etc., etc. Anyway, this is an unashamed plug for the conference. ...

In this Issue: Emiel Jongerius, Michael Washington, Kevin Dockx, Alex van Beek, and Alex Golesh. Sorry for being silent, but dealing with an imploding contract and training my replacement is sucking the energy out of me. Here is a Submittal only post... From SilverlightCream.com: Postponing actions Emiel Jongerius has a new post up on a utility class that can be used to limit the calls to internal synchronization methods of objects... think DeferRefresh. Dynamically Loading Silverlight Video Players ...

PivotViewer series Building your first PivotViewer application Runtime PivotViewer collection creation PivotViewer - Working with Facets Handling PivotViewer events PivotViewer - Custom actions PivotViewer and MVVM Intro In this next tutorial about the Silverlight PivotViewer control I would like to give a little more depth on Facets. What are facets, and how are they used in runtime generation of collections using the PivotServerTools library. This tutorial continues on techniques from last tutorial ...

In no particular order, here are the technologies with which I wish to dabble/learn/master. Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Windows Embedded (in a strictly hobbyist, build your own pet dog, approach) MEF Rx (Reactive Extensions) Parallel Programming Web Design (my skills are way out of date, like the HTML 5 spec!) Though I have never been diagnosed with anything, I suffer from an incessent lack of focus. Call it what you will... ADD, ADHD, Shiny Key Syndrome... it sucks. It makes an evening that could ...

In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Michael Washington, Mingfei Yan, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Roger Peters, Rob Eisenberg, and Microsoft. From SilverlightCream.com: Use the ASP.NET Authentication Service with Windows Phone 7 Rénald Nollet has a cool post up combining the ASP.NET Security Service with WP7... this was getting a lot of play on twitter last night... Printing With LightSwitch Michael Washington's latest Lightswitch post is a tutorial on printing from Lightswitch culminating in a very professional-looking ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Timmy Kokke(-2-), Jeremy Likness, Chris Koenig, Rob Miles(-2-), Bob Caswell, and Alex Yakhnin(-2-). Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuth adds a video to go along with his last post Developing for the Windows Phone 7 - Part 4: Tombstoning Scott Hanselman talks to Jeff Wilcox about WP7 performance: Hanselminutes Podcast 228 - Performance of Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 Indrajit AKA indifromoz is keeping a page of WP7 resources you may want to bookmark: Windows Phone 7 Resources ...

In this Issue: Anton Polimenov, Shawn Wildermuth, Gergely Orosz, Chris Koenig, Tim Heuer(-2-), Tim Greenfield, Nigel Sampson(-2-), Shawn Oster, and John Papa. Shoutouts: Telerik has announced The Telerik Eastern Canada User Group Tour is Coming... ... check out the cities and don't miss it! Erik Mork and company have my buddy Walt Ritscher on this week: Show 103: Windows Phone 7 Development Hardware with Walt Ritscher From SilverlightCream.com: WP7: Screen Considerations for Developers Anton Polimenov ...

In this Issue: Emiel Jongerius, Rui Marinho, Johnny Tordgeman, and Colin Eberhardt. Shoutout: Arnie Rowland has a very worthy effort going on: Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes ... ... read it and if you need the support, give it a shot. Bart Czernicki has a fun announcement: Announcing my new book: Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software In this all-submittal Issue -- From SilverlightCream.com: Synchronizing group row headers with column headers in Silverlight DataGrid Did you know you can ...

[This email uses the word fab too many times] I am just back from a fab “two centre holiday”. First up was Cumbria, mainly the fells rather than the lakes. Absolutely beautiful. Rained every day :-) Next up was the North York Moors. Absolutely beautiful. Rained every day :-) Definitely recommend the format – although maybe with less rain :-) Which brings me to my change of job which started this week (Aug 2010). The last two years were fab Back in July 2008 I switched from being an ISV Architect ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Brian Noyes, Rudi Grobler, Benjamin Gavin, Walter Ferrari, Shawn Wildermuth, Jeff Wilcox(-2-), David Anson, Jeremy Likness, and Manuel Felício. Shoutout: Cigdem Patlak announced a SilverlightShow Webinar: Data binding in action by Gill Cleeren... check out Cigdem's post and sign up... it's tomorrow, August 19th! Shawn Wildermuth shares What I learned about Windows Phone 7 from Android From SilverlightCream.com: The First Hour With Lightswitch –BETA- Curious about ...

PivotViewer series Building your first PivotViewer application Runtime PivotViewer collection creation PivotViewer - Working with Facets Handling PivotViewer events PivotViewer - Custom actions PivotViewer and MVVM Intro Today I would like to show you how you can consume web services in the PivotViewer control for Silverlight and build a collection at runtime. This tutorial is based on examples found on www.getpivot.com and the getting started tutorial I posted earlier this week. This tutorial used ...

This month I had the opportunity to help Corey Haines host a code retreat here in Orlando. We had a great turn out and everyone seemed to have a great time. I was thinking it might help someone else out if I documented what I did to set this one up here in Orlando. Once you decide to host, or help host one here’s what you might want to consider about a month or so before Corey even show’s up. Get Permission and Help I decided to host mine where I worked and went straight to my VP to ensure I could ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Michael Crump, Don Burnett, John Papa, Jeremy Alles, Rob Miles(-2-), and David Gadd. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Open File Dialog Behavior (MVVM) Michael Washington has a cool post up on building a Behavior in Blend to produce an Open File Dialog. “Fade in” Screen in Silverlight 4 Michael Crump responds to some questions about a 'fade-in' screen effect built with Expression Blend, and has a tutorial up on that and a demo page. Windows Phone Design Days ...

This past Saturday I am very pleased to say that SharePoint Saturday Columbus 2010 (SPSColumbus) was a success. I’m happy to say that for many reasons, not least amongst 1) I had an awesome team help me plan this event, 2) the session I presented went really well, and 3) the early feedback I’ve gotten from those who attended has been very positive. This marks the first SharePoint Saturday in Columbus and second in Ohio (SPSCleveland was last Novermber.) It’s great to see SharePoint Saturdays expanding ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Alex Yakhnin(-2-), Vikram Pendse, Kunal Chowdhury, Braulio Diez, Antoni Dol, Nigel Sampson(-2-), Tim Heuer, and Jeff Wilcox. Shoutout: Erik Mork & Co. have their latest podcast up: Show 102: Windows Phone 7 Development Heats Up Einar Ingebrigtsen has a demo before and after of Balder - vertex colors From SilverlightCream.com: A Simple DataGrid Delete Button Using View Model / MVVM Michael Washington has another post up discussing the DataGrid Delete Button, ...

You can learn a lot in 140 characters (if you follow the right people). @skimedic(Phil Japikse), tweeting from the Cincinnati Day of Agile this morning, mentioned MOSCOW. I was unfamiliar with that mnemonic, so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. It's a requirement prioritization technique, and the letters stand for: M - MUST have this. S - SHOULD have this if at all possible. C - COULD have this if it does not affect anything else. W - WON'T have this time but WOULD like in the future Speaking of ...

Technorati Tags: .NET,C#,Jon Skeet I'm really looking forward to the second edition of Jon Skeet's C# in Depth book, which should be printed in September. I took advantage of this "SkeetTweet" from yesterday: 45% off C# in Depth 2nd edition (http://manning.com/skeet2) - use coupon msa1145 at checkout. Valid until August 17th. …to pre-order the printed book, plus "Manning Early Access Program" access to PDFs of chapters from the work-in-progress, plus a PDF copy of the complete first edition, all ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Mickael Chambaud, Colin Eberhardt, Jeff Wilcox, John Papa, Jesse Liberty, Karsten Januszewski, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), and Tim Heuer. Shoutout: David Anson posted his Updated collection of great Silverlight/WPF/Windows Phone Data Visualization resources! From SilverlightCream.com: Using the “Hisowa Simple PopUp Behavior” in a DataGrid Michael Washington has a tutorial up showing how to use the "Hisowa simple popup Behavior" that he assisted on getting to codeproject ...

After taking a lot of time with C# fundamentals, I decided to go down a different road this week and talk about some of the differences in C# that can be troublesome to people who are used to C++ development but are learning C#. My first post on this blog months ago was just a simple piece on how I divorced C++ as my first-love language (here). This is not to say that C++ is not still a valuable language, in fact as far as object-oriented languages go C++ is still king of performance. That said, ...

Over the past several years social media has grown from just a few sites to a booming industry. With the wealth of information and entertainment available on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, it is easy to see where it has come from and why it has stuck. Little wonder why people, developers and companies have sought to leverage the connections found on social media outlets to further careers, sell products or just plain connect to the rest of the world. Recently, I had been asked to develop ...

In this Issue: René Schulte, Haruhiro Isowa, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, Shawn Wildermuth, Evan Hutnick, Don Burne, Mark Tucker, On Ali Tinwala, Derik Whittaker, and Mark Arteaga. Shoutouts: Chris Cavanagh has converted his Soft Body Physics Demo to WP7: JelloPhone for Windows Phone 7 Joe Healy has his list of 7 Steps to Get You Going on Windows Phone 7 Dev ... I might add a couple more links to item 5, but I'm prejudiced :) If you're in the mood for purchasing a WP7 Toolkit for building apps, ...

En el artículo anterior se definieron los conceptos de la Nube y Cloud Computing, y se repasó rápidamente la evolución de tecnologías que favorecieron el surgimiento de dicho paradigma. En el presente artículo se definirán los diferentes conceptos “*aaS” relacionados con el concepto de cloud computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.). SaaS digamos que ya es un término hasta cierto punto conocido, pero ¿y los demás? Eso es lo que se aclarará en este artículo. Los servicios de computación en la Nube, así como ...

In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Xianzhong Zhu, Joost van Schaik, Dan Wahlin, and Sergey Barskiy. Shoutouts: Jason Zander posted a Sample Update: Windows Phone 7 Example Application for Beta Tools Jesse Liberty has a great post up this morning: Ten Rules For Moving Your Blog Without Falling Off The Edge Of The Web A handfull of postings left over from last night, but I know I'll not get any added on during the day today, so I'm pushing these out early. From SilverlightCream.com: Sharepoint 2010 SilverXplorer ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Jeff Fansler, Jeff Wilcox, Rob Eisenburg, Vikram Pendse, Nigel Sampson(-2-), Jesse Liberty, Simon Jackson, and Nick Ohrn. Shoutout: I'm pretty sure I found this link via @brian_henderson: Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone New and untried: Can't find the link I got this from, but it looks interesting for wp7dev XNA: Helium From SilverlightCream.com: Deleting A Silverlight DataGrid Row With A Button On The Row Michael Washington ...

In this Issue: Viktor Larsson, Roger Peters, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Kyle McClellan, Jag Reehal, Dinesh Sodani, David Rousset, Jeff Fansler, Paul Sheriff, Jeremy Likness, Mohamed Mosallem, and Jonathan van de Veen. Shoutout: The Visual Web Developer Team Blog posted Hot Fix Released for the Issue of Visual Studio 2010 Crashing When Switching to the Design View From SilverlightCream.com: Snipping databound properties Viktor Larsson has discussion of code snippets up in his latest post. He's specifically ...

In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Jeff Fansler, Xianzhong Zhu(-2-), Anton Polimenov, Braulio Díez Botella, Alex Yakhnin, Willem Meints, Shawn Hargreaves, John Papa, and Roger Peters. Shoutout: I found this via Mike Taulty, and it's pretty darn cool: zoom.it from LiveLabs, and I did one of my blog From SilverlightCream.com: Visual Studio Solution Pivot Viewer. Add-on for VS2010 to Visualize Code Structure Max Paulousky has a post up about a VS2010 add-in that uses just too much of the goodness we all ...

Last week I went into quite a bit of detail on C# struct (here) and the consequences of using a struct versus a class to represent complex data types. In the course of that article, I had a section describing the differences between value types and reference types and thought I would expand upon one of the ideas in there which seems to confuse some folks who are new to C#: parameter passing nuances. But first, let's lay the groundwork with some definitions: Parameter - the variable defined in a method ...

In this Issue: Jeff Fansler, Chris Klug, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Mike Taulty, David Anson, Florent Pajani, Kunal Chowdhury, Mike Snow, and Jesse Liberty. Shoutouts: The Swiss Team Blog announced Hands-on Lab: Silverlight 4 Line of Business Application using WCF RIA Services Now updated to reflect RTM changes Dan Wahlin posted his Silverlight 4 Code Demos from the Microsoft TechReady Workshop From SilverlightCream.com: The Windows Phone 7 Application Bar Jeff Fansler has another WP7 post up and is talking ...

One of my colleagues pointed me at Howard Baines as a recent example of a web consultancy already using Visual Studio 2010 and Entity Framework 4.0 to build web applications. I managed to grab a little time with co-founder Clive Howard (on twitter) to talk through some of the decisions, especially as I was intrigued to learn that they started out on Open Source Software including Ruby on Rails before switching to the .NET Framework. We discuss: Why switch to the .NET Framework? Entity Framework 4.0 ...